Fostering Emotional Strength and Resilience for StrongBlackWomen

Your emotions can be tricky – no matter what your level of strength. Emotional instability can cause immediate damage to you and those around you, as well as the future damage of burned bridges and ruined relationships.

Here are six ways to get grounded when you feel yourself becoming emotionally unstable. These tips will help you foster emotional resilience that will allow you to be strong, remain stronger, and be more emotionally stable.

1. Don’t Take Everything Personally – It’s Not Always About You

For that matter, try not to take anything personally! If you come from the perspective that you’re okay, and someone else’s comments or attitudes are their issues, not yours, you’re much less apt to become defensive. Don’t take on that extra baggage.

2. Be In Control

Realize that you can control your emotions – they do not have to control you. Really believe it, because it’s the truth. Become aware of negative thought patterns that serve to break you down, and begin changing those thought habits.

3. Don’t Hold Emotions In

Emotionally stable people know that suppressing emotions is a kiss of death. It fosters emotional instability by allowing a situation where you’re likely to have a huge negative explosion of emotion. So, learn to become assertive and say what you need to say to those who you feel need to hear it.

4. Become a Positive Thinker – Intentionally and By Habit

It’s easy to let negative thinking ruin our day, our year, our life. Negative thinking is simply a habit that can be reformed. Try this: every time you find yourself having a negative thought, turn it around into something positive, and speak the positive thought out loud. The more you do this, the more you’ll begin to think positively naturally, without any prompting – especially since it’s impossible to speak a positive thought out loud and think a negative thought at the same time.

5. Breathe and Take a Step Back

If you feel yourself approaching an emotionally unstable state, take a few minutes to breathe deeply, close your eyes, assess your emotions, and re-center your mind into a positive place. Don’t react. Don’t get worked up. Just back up, and breathe.

6. Learn That You Have a Choice- Always

Your emotions result from the choices you make about them. You can wake up unhappy, but choose to be happy. You choose every day to create the day you’ll have emotionally. If something happens during the day to anger or frustrate you, it is your choice to stay in that mindset or allow the anger or frustration for a few moments, then choose to let that anger or frustration go.

You always have a choice, and learning to exercise that choice wisely will help you become more emotionally resilient, emotionally strong, and have a greater overall control of what you’re feeling.